Been working on a similar idea of an in-terminal IDE with more and more batteries included

https://github.com/paradise-runner/toast

Except you can, you know, sustain human life off of farm land. You can’t do that from a data center.

Which doesn’t happen all that often and the government is probably aware of who is a citizen and who isn’t.

The US doesn't have a population register in the same way as European countries do.

For reference, the Finnish voting experience is such that about a month before the election you get a card to your registered address, telling what the election is and what's your polling place. Then you show up on the day in question, show an ID, they check that against their list and off you go.

This is the coolest dang project

For me it’s that why do I need another application open? I have my coding agents in the terminal, I should also be able to traverse and read a codebase in the terminal as well

Why do you want you coding agents to be in a terminal? A terminal is missing latex rendering, inline images, a browser showing what the agent is clicking on, being able to view a spreadsheet and then select a region to reference in the conversation, clickable links when it references a specific line number with mouse-over previews, and interactive inline visualisations. A coding agent missing any of those is a significantly worse experience, yet people are for some reason willing to give up all of them to have their coding agents run in a terminal. It's not even like you get a familiar environment to work in, nothing that you set up in your terminal carries over into your agent or IDE.

Terminals have had inline images for a long time at this point

Exactly.

We need this terminal TUI nonsense trend to completely die.

Stop using TUIs! They are garbage.

Honestly, the GUI is more intuitive and everyone can use it.

But GUIs are less useful for remote access unless you want to take on the challenge of creating a web front-end for everything.

Throw an issue up there and I can try to take a whack at it!

That’s just the theme matching the terminal, there are two others out of the box but I prefer the system theme. And by beautiful I mean it has a cohesive system design and theming. I prefer to to another VsCode clone

Poor wording, more so meant that when I drop into vim, vi, or emacs I have no way to (without some external knowledge) know how to open a file tree. Just a barrier to usage is all.

By external knowledge, do you mean knowing how the program you're using works?

the point of the GUI is that folks can intuit how a program works without having to be versed in how it works.

Okay. For what it's worth, vim tells you that you can type :help to get help every time you start it up. It would take a while until you got to the section about the file tree, though.

Yeah maybe not the best wording. It’s more meant that ideally toast can be fully used with a cursor for interactions. I don’t think you can exit vim or emacs just by clicking on a button?

You absolutely can exit Emacs by clicking a button! Even when it is running in terminal. You just need menu-bar-mode (which is enabled by default) and enabling xterm-mouse-mode (which also should be enabled by default) - https://asciinema.org/a/rprH0gLSkrUz2cqr

You can: emacs has a menu bar and you can quit emacs that way. If you write code in your .emacs.d to turn off the menu bar, then I think you can be trusted to use the keyboard to quit emacs.

I think you're learning that Toast exists due to "skill issues."

You can exit Emacs by clicking a button, by making a mouse gesture, by telling it via voice command, by key-press, by modal key-chord sequence, by writing into a file, by selecting a menu item, by directly evaling (kill-emacs) command, by cookie in a file you merely visit, by a keyboard macro replayed from a register, by an abbrev whose expansion hook quits, by evaling an Org-mode source block, via a timer, via built-in solar and lunar calendars, by a shell command run inside Emacs that kills its own parent, by SIGTERM or SIGHUP from outside, by closing the last frame under the WM, by an LLM agent with an eval tool, and by pulling the power cord.

"I don't think" is never a good argument for making wide claims about anything.

Vim has full mouse support. Not only can you exit, but you can even save using just the mouse.

Yep, I have 2 kids under 1 so this project is either built with AI or it’s not built. I put that line in because the IDE aspect doesn’t need agent management or anything. Other tools are better for that.

Then maybe sometimes it's better to take a break and not bend the natural constraints of life for once. I mean, I'm all for easing some of life with automation but it seems that a general trend is emerging where people will just keep on going no matter what, when maybe we should just stop once in a while.

I have been feeling an increasing self-imposed pressure to get more done with AI. Similar to the feeling I get when I play factorio too long. It's like the frontier of possibility has radically shifted and I feel almost guilty for not jumping into it. Tugging at me..

Idk the point of my comment but I feel you.

It would still be nice if you stated upfront that this is built with AI. The people who are interested in “no AI features” are likely to also be the ones who do not want something built with AI. It would help to be clear about the project’s stance on the matter.

For sure the right call, really appreciate it. Judging from the comments my lack of product and marketing skills is showing.

The first thing I notice is an AGENTS.md in the repo.

Irish twins! congratulations :)

Thanks so much! Only reason this got posted today is because everyone is home sick